the two of us with him, the night when we came to New York in answer to his
call, Ragnar and I. He told us what we had to do and what sort of men we had
to reach. He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a
slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of
the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when
we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was
done. He did not ask us to join him at once. He told us to think it over and
to weigh everything it would do to our lives. I gave him my answer on the
morning of the second day, and Ragnar a few hours later, in the afternoon. .
. . Dagny, that was the morning after our last night together. I had seen, in
a manner of vision that I couldn't escape, what it was that I had to fight
for.
It was for the way you looked that night, for the way you talked about
your railroad—for the way you had looked when we tried to see the skyline of
New York from the top of a rock over the Hudson—I had to save you, to clear
the way for you, to let you find your city—not to let you stumble the years
of your life away, struggling on through a poisoned fog, with your eyes still
held straight ahead, still looking as they had looked in the sunlight,
struggling on to find, at the end of your road, not the towers of a city, but
a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by means of
swallowing the gin your life had gone to pay for! You,—to know no joy in
order that he may know it? You—to serve as fodder for the pleasure of others?
You—as the means for the subhuman as the end? Dagny, that was what I saw and
that was what I couldn't let them do to you! Not to you, not to any child who
had your kind of look when-he faced the future, not to any man who had your
spirit and was able to experience a moment of being proudly, guiltlessly,
confidently, joyously alive. That was my love, that state of the human
spirit, and I left you to fight for it, and I knew that if I were to lose
you, it was still you that I would be winning with every year of the battle.
But you see it now, don't you? You've seen this valley. It's the place we set
out to reach when we were children, you and I. We've reached it. What else
can I ask for now? Just to see you here—did John say you're still a scab?—oh
well, it's only a matter of tune, but you'll be one of us, because you've
always been, if you don't see it fully, we'll wait, I don't care—
so long as you're alive, so long as I don't have to go on flying over the
Rockies, looking for the wreckage of your plane!"
She gasped a little, realizing why he had not come to the valley on time.
He laughed. "Don't look like that. Don't look at me as if I were a wound
that you're afraid to touch."
"Francisco, I've hurt you in so many different ways—"
"No! No, you haven't hurt me—and he hasn't either, don't say anything
about it, it's he who's hurt, but we'll save him and he'll come here, too,
where he belongs, and he'll know, and then he, too, will be able to laugh
about it. Dagny, I didn't expect you to wait, I didn't hope, I knew the
chance I'd taken, and if it had to be anyone, I'm glad it's he."
She closed her eyes, pressing her lips together not to moan.
"Darling, don't! Don't you see that I've accepted it?"
But it isn't—she thought—it isn't he, and I can't tell you the truth,
because it's a man who might never hear it from me and whom I might never
have.
"Francisco, I did love you—" she said, and caught her breath, shocked,
realizing that she had not intended to say it and, simultaneously, that this
was not the tense she had wanted to use.
"But you do," he said calmly, smiling. "You still love me—even if there's
one expression of it that you'll always feel and want, but will not give me
any longer. I'm still what I was, and you'll always see it, and you'll always
grant me the same response, even if there's a greater one that you grant to